Neighbourhood screen flashing to black

[cwykes]

Does anyone know why this happens, how to avoid it or better still how to fix affected 'hoods?  I thought this was a post-seasons patch problem, but I hit it again yesterday running OFB only with Numenor's base game starter.  I also did a search on MATY and found a post from someone who first hit this problem with Pets.

Basically the neighborhood map never loads.  The screen is flashing between black and the blue "hood loading" screen.  By clicking around you can get the text about lots to show up and you can get into lots.  Once it has happened, the problem seems permanent. 

I've had this happen when I first tried to play a hood after installing Seasons & patch together.  I've had it happen when I added the Seasons patch to a seasons game that was OK and now I've had it happen to an OFB hood where the 'hood screen had been laggy with commands not registering and graphics not keeping up. No error messages from on screen any time.  There is one non-empty log from todays session after I re-installed BaseGameStarter - it's a New-config-log.txt and I've attached it.  The hood with the problem is N003.

Some affected hoods were big or complicated, this one is tiny and new - played only 5-6 times for building and lot testing, it has 2 sims and 20 lots.  I'd had the computer on a long time before I hit the problem.  I can't remember what I was doing, but it's possible I'd been playing BV in my full game.

I have a full set of EPs and SPs at last, all patched.  I have a camera mod, usershaders on, boolprop testingcheatsenabled true, most of the directors cut & maxis CC only.  My PC's about 5 years old; it's a Dell Dimension 2400 with a 2.66 Ghz processor, Windows XP home SP2, 1GB RAM, a Radeon 9250 Graphics card, soundmax digital audio that came with the PC and a large fixed page file as per Paladin's tutorial.  I'll post dxdiag if that helps.


Links to related posts:-
my previous thread with false assumptions and incomplete data:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,9008.0.html

Eleonora blames it on too many trees
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,8285.0.html

Chienne got it for the first time after the Seasons patch like I did the first couple of times
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,7895.msg219017.html#msg219017

Imyourboy had it with Pets - blamed it on a camera mod
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,7300.0.html

Kala had a similar problem which JFade thought was just memory overload.
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,8916.msg244126.html#msg244126

[ReneeFox]

Honey, tons of people are having this problem (including me)!!!!!!!  Been whining about it since BV came out on TS2's site, and EA appears to be ignoring the issue while racing off to create another EP.  There was supposed to be another patch for BV, and lots of people are asking about it ... only to get 0 response from EAxis.  Boooooo; greedy bastardos!  There was a video driver memory leak in Pets that caused the game to crash/freeze all the time.  nVidia put out a driver work-around that made this disappear during Seasons.  Then, either BV found another leak, or that was never the problem to begin with.  nVidia says BV is using the wrong instructions to identify the video card, but with stuff like this, who really knows?  I keep my computer ship-shape, and fought long and hard for EA to fix this after Pets came out.  When it happened to BV, I gave up buying anything else, because I had nobody else to gang-up with and go after EA like we all should be doing about this!!!  I ran out of steam, and will probably never extend that much energy alone about an addicting game like The Sims.   

boolProp useShaders off helps, but does not eliminate the freeze and makes various graphical details disappear... 

[cwykes]

Thanks for the sympathy   So you think the flashing 'hood screen is just another sympton of the big memory leak/crappy coding issue?  I was beginning to think it was something specific to my PC set up.  My game ran fine when I only had base + OFB, so why am I getting it now if I'm running the same set up via the Base Game Starter?  I had usershaders on in the OFB days too.

I've seen reports of graphical problems of course, but I've not found posts about flashing hood screens.  I've also seen plenty of posts about crashing and freezing from Pets onward, but my game is not actually doing either.  My problems are only on the 'hood screen; I don't have any real problems within lots.

My problem can't be Nvidia - I've got a radeon card and that's ATI.   

I did get a reply from a real person when I reported it to Eaxis, unfortunately the suggested fix didn't work.

[jlkeal]

I've got the same problem with an ATI card, as well. Mine started out getting wonky in the neighborhood screen (the same flashing) and has now progressed onto the lots. Even the small lots. It always happens after several hours of play. So far, the only way I've gotten around it is to lower some of my graphic settings.

[cwykes]

Have you ever got the hood screen back to normal for a 'hood with a flashing screen?  Mine seem permanently fubared, but maybe I haven't tried the right things.

[jlkeal]

Occasionally,  just using the auto configuration on my monitor will work (sometimes it takes a couple of times). Other times, I have to minimize the game to my desktop, wait several minutes, then bring the game back up. Usually my graphics card will try to readjust itself. If those two ideas don't work for me, I just shut the game down and wait a couple of hours. I've been meaning to call ATI this week about this problem, since my card is still in warranty. I've only had it for a few months. Maybe they'll have a better idea.

Or maybe I'll hear the tech groan again after I told him what game I was having trouble in with the last card.     

[Eleonora]

I'm sticking to my story, it's too many trees.
Of course, the trees could merely be a symptom, with an overworked card as the cause. I used to have this problem quite often, until I stopped using certain terrains, and only used those with no decorations whatsoever on them. It seems to have done the trick, I can have as many lots as I want to, and never get the flashing thing.
Recently I did get some flashing when I tried to add Maxis' original Downtown and Bluewater Village to a hood, I fixed it by using terrain surgery on them. So it's definitely something to do with decorations or trees, since after surgery I had the same lots but nothing else and my subhoods ran fine.

[Halouja]

cwykes - way back when I installed the Seasons patch, I had exactly the same problem with one of my neighbourhoods - the neighbourhood view screen would never load, the screen would just keep flashing all the time, but with careful
mouse use you could find and enter the lots, which all played normally, and if you could get into them, the sub-neighbourhoods loaded and played fine too. I found sometimes that if you entered a lot, moved one of the garden trees and then saved and exited back to the neighbourhood, then the neighbourhood view was back to normal, but often it wasn't. Even if it was, if you exited the game and then reloaded, the flashing was back. At the time I had an ATI Radeon 9200 128 MB AGP graphics card which functioned perfectly well, apart from being unable to see fishes in ponds and fish tanks, the enhanced pool reflections or the x-ray snow cursor.

I searched around the various forums that I belonged to at the time but I've only ever encountered one other person who experienced this problem, and he was as mystified as I was. It was most frustrating - all the other neighbourhoods were absolutely fine. Eventually the flashing became too much to bear and the affected neighbourhood was deleted. I've never experienced the problem again and never came close to finding out what caused it.

[jlkeal]

I talked to the ATI tech and he said if Nvidia is having problems with the game as well, it does sound like the game is causing most of the problems. He said until they come up (EAxis) with a patch to fix the problem, what I had been doing would be his first suggestion. Yes, I did tell him that a patch to fix that will most likely never happen.

He said in my case, my biggest problem at the moment could be that my processor can't keep up with my graphic card's speed, which will also cause graphic corruption. I have an ancient processor (AMD 1.7) and my card is a higher end card so yes, I need to upgrade my motherboard. I've slowly upgraded everything else, and was planning on my next purchase of upgrading the MB and more RAM, anyway. I SHOULD have done that a long time ago. 

[cwykes]

Halouha - Interesting that you got it first with the seasons patch same as me and the simmer one of the other posts I found.....  I'll have to move a tree and see if that helps.  I'm sure Eleanora will say it fits her tree theory!

Jlkeal - I don't think we know for sure that this particular problem does happen with Nvidia.  You, I and Halouja all have ATI cards.  Eleanor didn't say.  Checking back on those links, I think the other sufferers either had old ATI cards or didn't say.

[KellyQ]

Halouha - Interesting that you got it first with the seasons patch same as me and the simmer one of the other posts I found.....  I'll have to move a tree and see if that helps.  I'm sure Eleanora will say it fits her tree theory!

Jlkeal - I don't think we know for sure that this particular problem does happen with Nvidia.  You, I and Halouja all have ATI cards.  Eleanor didn't say.  Checking back on those links, I think the other sufferers either had old ATI cards or didn't say.

I've had the same problem for a while but I don't recall if it started before or after the Seasons' patch.

I have a Nvidia card.

[speedreader]

Same problem, post Seasons, but I never installed the patch.  ATI Radeon 9000 (honestly I can't believe it is still running this game at all). 

I had to delete the neighborhood in which it began, but I solved it in others by disabling my firewall and internet access before I start Sims.  Very occasionally it will still happen if I have had the game running for an extended period of time in the neighborhood screen while I am off doing something else.  Restarting the game fixes the problem. 

[ingeli]

I am not sure if its the same problem I had a while a go, I figured out it was the hood camera mod, I installed a different one and the flashing stopped. In my case it was the main hood that was the problem, subhoods were fine.

[cwykes]

Good news.... I actually fixed a hood yesterday for the first time ever .  This is the one in my BGS OFB only game.  I got into a lot by trial and error from a flashing 'hood screen, moved a tree on the lot, moved it back to it's original location(!), saved and came back to a normal hood screen.  I then saw that the 'hood map had an insane number of trees, so I deleted trees until I got finger cramp in two fingers and now I'm hoping that hood stays fixed.  I tried another hood that hadn't been loading since the Seasons patch and this time it loaded magically.  Maybe BV helped somehow.  That one is a big map and I can't actually scroll round it properly to check the edges for trees.  Anyway, I deleted a lot of the trees I could see on a 'can't hurt' basis.

It's always been the main hoods in my game, never a sub-hood.  Maybe sub-hoods are different in some way, but I suspect it's just that we don't put the effort in on those the way we do on the main hood screen.

I'm wondering if the problem with camera mods is that they let you see more of the map, thus making the screen drawing more complicated.  Like Ingeli I had to change to a simpler 'hood camera mod with Seasons.

I can force everything together into the following framework, it makes sense to me, but that doesn't mean it's right!  So what do you think?
The game screws up when it doesn't have sufficient memory to load a complicated 'hood screen.  It gets stuck or messed up somewhere and just flashes at you.  Clicking on parts of the map will let you see descriptive text and enter lots. People call this graphics corruption.  Prevent the problem by adding/freeing up memory and not letting the hood screen get too complicated for your PC e.g. not too many trees! If your hood screen is laggy take preventative action by deleting 'hood decor, changing/deleting 'hood camera mods and/or turning down graphics options.  You are quite likely to hit the problem for the first time with Seasons patch - hood screens got a lot more complicated with Seasons (DK why the patch is the problem not the EP itself).  If you hit the problem try to get into a lot and change something to give the game a chance to redraw the screen.

[jlkeal]

That could be why my neighborhood screen hasn't been flashing for some time now. I did change my camera mod a while back to another that was compatible with BV. I still get 'blackouts', both in my neighborhood and in my lots, but that's after quite a few hours of game play. That's probably due to my slow processor.

I do get less 'blackouts' by simply turning off shadows and reflections. It also gives me a few more hours of game play before my PC has had enough and crashes the game. I like the idea of getting rid of the trees in the neighborhood. I enjoy seeing a lush neighborhood and all, but I'm only in the neighborhood view for a minute or two, so it wouldn't make much difference to me with less trees. Anything to get more game play time, in my opinion.

[miaokitty]

Does anyone know why this happens, how to avoid it or better still how to fix affected 'hoods?  I thought this was a post-seasons patch problem, but I hit it again yesterday running OFB only with Numenor's base game starter.  I also did a search on MATY and found a post from someone who first hit this problem with Pets.

I am pretty convinced now that it's the trees (or really all neighborhood decor and roads).

This happened to me a few weeks ago in a Uni subhood, using this lovely but ridiculous map: http://hideki.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=252232

Seeing Eleonora's tree theory, I checked the NHTR bit and there were fourteen thousand fucking trees on that map.  (It was also stupidly lumpy, but that's a story for another day.)  However, it was exactly the shape I was looking for, and so, after about eight attempts to get it loaded, I set out deleting trees.  It's actually not so bad if you do it in front of TV, and since they're so close together, you can just tape down the delete key and click randomly.

After the trees were obliterated, everything worked perfectly.

Then today, I finally got my shiny package of "Sims 2 Season Story."  Immediate borkage of the main hood.  Luckily I had backups, but even these did not work.

I tried everything else, because the memory of those 14,000 trees was still fresh.  "Please, not the trees again!"

I tried removing downloads, deleting *.cache files, swapping in the Seasons stealth suburb from a working hood, and even somehow managed to load up said suburb in game (it's boring, didn't even have the decency to be broken), but no fix.  The only thing that made a shred of difference was the "dontmergeNHflora" cheat, which, let me see my 'hood after I had brought up the Neighborhood switcher.  The problem was that it was so incredibly lagged that there was no way I would be able to nuke enough trees to make a difference.

*whew* Sob story over.  The fix, as I did it:

0. Get a camera mod so you can see the whole neighborhood.  I know some people have said these caused their problem, but trees lurk in the far corners of your 'hood.  Most of the 14,000 trees mentioned above would not be visible with the standard neighborhood camera.

1. Make a new neighborhood with the same map as the problem 'hood.

2. Obliterate all trees and whatever else you can.  It is helpful to use a contrasting terrain.

3. Open new neighborhood in SimPE.  Check NTHR bit to make sure treeicide is complete.  Extract NHTR.

4. Open affected neighborhood and replace NHTR with shiny bare version.

5. Load in game.  Trees gone!  If a road is floating or sunken, try placing a new lot along it and it should level out.

6. Keep bare NHTR file for future use of affected map.

I have blank NHTRs for maps "Bonito" (above) and "Rushburg Heights" (http://hideki.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=191484).  The Bonito one might be a little weird as I tried to use the SC4 Terraformer to flatten the map; not sure how that will affect use of the NHTR on an unflattened version.  Anyway I can send either of those to anyone who wants them,

[cwykes]

I wonder if the problem with the camera mod is that when you see more of the 'hood, there are more trees to show on screen?  Maybe you start without the camera mod, delete tons of trees, then put it back and delete some more?

[miaokitty]

I wonder if the problem with the camera mod is that when you see more of the 'hood, there are more trees to show on screen?  Maybe you start without the camera mod, delete tons of trees, then put it back and delete some more?

Could work, depending on the proportion of visible to invisible trees.  Though I'm not sure the camera mod really makes any difference to how much of the neighborhood is actually drawn.  It's probably still there even though you can't see it, and the camera mods may be causing an unrelated problem with the same symptoms.

I forgot to add that I read somewhere that the type of trees in the 'hood vary every time you start a new one from the same map.  This seemed to be the case with the maps above; though I don't know if the included maps are different in this regard.  So part of the reason that I managed to load that stupid Bonito map on the eighth try might be that it finally picked a lower-poly tree (damn unclickable cacti).  If this is the case, simply deleting and retrying until you get a workable set of flora may also help.

[simsfreq]

I had this problem a while ago. I have an NVidia too. I managed to fix it by adding more RAM (my computer was running on the minimum.)

It seemed to be something like the graphics card overheating as it would only do it when I had been playing for a long time or if I did certain things a lot which used specific graphics effects.

[miaokitty]

I had this problem a while ago. I have an NVidia too. I managed to fix it by adding more RAM (my computer was running on the minimum.)

It seemed to be something like the graphics card overheating as it would only do it when I had been playing for a long time or if I did certain things a lot which used specific graphics effects.

This is interesting.  I play on a notebook that gets freakishly hot, and I have had overheating problems, but as far as I can tell my particular problem is not overheating.  In my case overheating issues occur after hours of play and present slightly different symptoms (flashing blue, affects all lots and 'hoods once started), while the flashing black problem happens at the beginning of play and does not affect all neighborhoods or any lots.

There seem to be multiple causes, so if this issue occurs, the best course of action may be to: A) Determine if you have an overheating problem.  Probably the case if the problem only occurs after long gameplay or if your machine is noticeably hot.  If not,  B) Temporarily remove camera mod, and if that doesn't work: C) Remove all neighborhood decor.